The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr
March 31st, 2008Title: The Big Switch
Author: Nicholas Carr
Publisher: W.W Norton & Company, Inc. (2008)
My latest review is The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr. Carr is an excellent author who writes about various technical/computing topics for the New York Times, Wired, and other publications. Carr is also the author of Does IT Matter?, which was generally misinterpreted by the IT community as an attack on IT. (His real point was that IT is no longer a competitive advantage for almost all companies because everyone does it, and all new innovations are quickly adopted by others).
In The Big Switch, Carr makes the argument that the future of computing and the internet (hereby to be referred to as the “intergoogle”) is coming fast…and is dramatically affecting the way we do business, socialize, and generally “compute.” The main thesis of the book is that computing power/storage is turning into a utility, rather than powered privately.
The method Carr uses to is to show the parallels between computing and electricity. It is very interesting to see how alike those two systems are…and Carr does a fantastic job making the comparison. In the first section of the book he alternates chapters between Edison’s world and the modern world…tying them together the entire way. It is very interesting to read about how (controlled) electricity found its way and expanded from its humble beginnings. But then again, I like history…and especially history about stuff that has been invented. (Side note: I would recommend Edison: A Life of Invention to anyone interested in that topic).
In the early stages, almost all electricity was generated privately for various corporations. Edison then wanted to provide electricity to New York City, which he was able to do after installing all of the infrastructure and building HUGE generator farms. Edison felt that the profit for electricity was in the electric dynamo, which generated all of the power. But one man, Samuel Insull, one of Edison’s employees saw it differently. Insull believed that the real money to be made was in providing electricity as a utility…rather than selling everyone the equipment individually. Insull left Edison to run the Chicago Edison Company, which he ran like a utility and proved his theory to be correct. So when you are mad at Duke Energy for raising rates and charging you too much…you have Samuel Insull to blame.
Carr’s choice of analogy proves to be right on…although its not something I would normally think of. But Carr makes such a strong case that we are headed in that direction. He lucidly explains how companies like Google and Salesforce.com are able to provide Web 2.0 services for their customers…and their customers love it.
Everyone pretty much already knows about Google and what it does with its search, e-mail, calendar, etc… Salesforce.com, on the other hand, is an interesting company that people don’t generally know about. Salesforce.com provides customer/client information for a company’s sales force. Like Google, all of the data as accessed remotely through their servers. This allows the company to be able to focus its attention on what it does best. They just leave all of the computing up to Salesforce.com. Obviously, there would be some security and data concerns, but apparently Salesforce.com has answered enough questions to be quite successful.
This book is a really interesting look at what the future of computing holds for corporate life and personal life as well. As more and more people use Web 2.0 applications for their own data storage, it will snowball this process (as an example…I am writing this right now using Google Docs). I don’t foresee any time soon when all data storage is done remotely, because a lot of people will always want to be able to have it “physically” with them…but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.
Utility computing is coming…and Nicholas Carr lays out exactly how it will happen. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in technology. There were a few slow parts…but overall it was a fantastic read.
Rating: 5 out of 5
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